132 HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK 



on which the All-wise Worker proceeded was his aim 

 and ambition. 



Stars had been seen by Flamsteed which Herschel 

 could no longer find. A century had elapsed, and 

 Herschel put these stars down as " lost." He meant 

 that a star thus noted was not to be seen when he 

 looked for it, " but that possibly at some future time, 

 if it be a changeable or periodical star, it may come to 

 be visible again." In other cases he entered in his 

 journal the remark, " Does not exist," when Flamsteed 

 had not himself seen the star. Herschel, however, 

 does not appear to have considered that these "lost 

 stars" may have been comets, or wanderers like his 

 own Uranus, or specks like the numerous body of 

 asteroids and satellites, that were then undiscovered. 

 In a paper written at a later period he found that 

 he had treated as faultless a catalogue of stars which 

 required correction. His conclusions regarding lost 

 or changing stars were thus premature. But neither 

 the poetic beauty nor the possibility of a " lost " star 

 can be denied. Perhaps he was only borrowing a 

 phrase that was used nearly two thousand years 

 earlier by Hipparchus, who, by his catalogue of the 

 fixed stars, gave future generations the means of 

 ascertaining " if stars could be lost and reappear, if 

 they changed their place, their size, their brightness." 



Dissatisfied with the principles on which stars 

 visible to the naked eye are classed, according to 

 their brightness, as stars of the first, or second down 

 to the sixth magnitude, he began, about 1782, to 

 adopt a new and more effective but certainly a very 

 laborious method of settling degrees of brightness 

 among the stars, and of determining to what extent 



